Search

Research done by Nielsen confirmed a trend that we’ve seen in recent years: more and more seniors are becoming active on the web. In November of 2004, there were 11.3 million active seniors online. In November 2009, that number jumped by 55% to 17.5 million. In addition, they spend more time on the web, totaling an average of 58 hours a month in front of the browser – just look at the data above.

Not only are B2B firms more likely overall to maintain a social network profile, they are managing profiles across more social networks and are significantly more likely to be present on Twitter, LinkedIn and YouTube. On the other side, B2C companies are more likely to maintain Facebook and MySpace profiles.

B2B social media users are more active in measuring most social success metrics. Although B2C companies are more likely than B2B firms to use revenues to measure their efforts, more B2Bs are looking at Web traffic, brand awareness, and prospect lead quality and volume. Web traffic was the top metric for both types of company.

Ver interesting is that 60% of B2B respondents used the online marketing best practice of Twitter search to monitor mentions of their company or brand, but only 35% of B2C companies dis this.

Like this:

To steal a line from Battlestar Galactica: All of this has happened before and all of it will happen again:

A group, in this case college age kids, discover an online sanctuary just to find out that everyone they have ever been in contact with including their parents are on it. First it was MySpace and everyone moved to Facebook, a safe haven for college age kids that required a .edu email address to join. This meant no parents, no relatives, no spam, no junk.

Then Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook decides that he needs to monetize Facebook and rake in the ca$h. He opens it up to everyone and there was only a tiny initial wave of users that committed Facebook-icide including myself (I only came back 2 years later because as a marketer I couldn’t miss out on this phenomenon). Then around this time last year, so November 2008, I started hearing stories that people’s parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles were now on Facebook and seeking them out – as if it wasn’t already awkward enough dodging Aunt Beth at the annual Thanksgiving dinner, but now people had to do it online? That’s where where many people are drawing the line.

Now Adweek throws out an article today about how Facebook is “getting” uncool for 18-24s (a.k.a. the college crowd) – to the surprise of many, but not people that have been following the pulse of this development.

Back to Battlestar Galactica: All of this has happened before and all of it will happen again.

So, now the (1 Billion Dollar) question is: What is next great thing that the kids are going to migrate to?
Twitter? I see twitter more as a compliment to Facebook and not a direct competitor. Sure there are people that only use twitter or Facebook, but they are such different beasts that they don’t directly compete.
Leapfish? I doubt that they can fill the shoes of Facebook as Leapfish is an aggregator, but not a source like Facebook or Twitter.

The only thing that is for sure is that “All of this has happened before and all of it will happen again.”

More evidence of Twitter uptake among young people comes from the Pew Internet & American Life Project. According to a September 2009 survey, 33% of online adults ages 18 to 29 use a status update service, a significant difference from the research firm’s previous poll on the subject.

This meant young adults were more likely to tweet than users ages 30 to 49, who had previously been considered the core group for Twitter.

Twitter specific: According to comScore the monthly traffic has leveled off at about 20 million visitors since July, after jumping from 4 million in February to 17 million in April. Mediapost speculates that the microblogging service could just be in a lull before another growth spurt.

Another day, another emarketer graph. The question is: What does this graph tell us?

1. Social media success is many-sided and complicated (nothing new there) 2. People want to hear the nitty-gritty tactics and not waste time with other things 3. Most importantly: Social Media is being accepted as an important part of the marketing mix and not just a fad